Stanisław Lem

Stanisław Herman Lem ( listen^{? /i}; * 12 September 1921 in Lviv, Poland; † 27 March 2006 in Kraków) was a Polish philosopher, essayist, and science fiction author. Lem's works have been translated into 57 languages and sold more than 45 million copies in total. He is one of the most widely read science fiction authors, although he did not like to call himself that because of the complexity of his work. Due to the numerous puns and word creations, his works are considered difficult to translate.

Lem is considered a brilliant visionary and utopian who conceived of numerous complex technologies decades before they were actually developed. Thus he wrote as early as the 1960s and 1970s on topics such as nanotechnology, neural networks and virtual reality. A recurring theme are philosophical and ethical aspects and problems of technical developments, such as artificial intelligence, human-like robots or genetic engineering. In many of his works he used satire and humorous devices, often cryptically exposing human superiority thinking based on faith in technology and science as hubris. Some of his works also bear gloomy and pessimistic features with regard to the long-term survivability of mankind. He frequently addressed attempts by humans to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences, which he treated as a major failure in one of his best-known novels, Solaris, for example.

In the 2000s, the well-rounded Lem became a critic of the Internet - which he predicted in part - and the information society because they turned users into "information nomads" who would only "hop incoherently from stimulus to stimulus." The general increase in technical performance, he said, was "paradoxically accompanied by a decline in people's imagination and intelligence."

Stanisław Lem, 1966

Lem's signature

Film adaptations

In 1960 Lem's novel Planet of Death (1954) was filmed in the GDR by DEFA under the title The Silent Star (directed by Kurt Maetzig); in the Federal Republic the film was later shown as Spaceship Venus Doesn't Answer.
The 1963 Czechoslovak film Ikarie XB 1 (directed by Jindrich Polák) is based on Lem's novel Guest in Space (1956), but does not name the author in the credits.
Based on Lem's short story Czy pan istnieje, Mr Jones? (Andrzej Wajda made the 36-minute TV film Przekładaniec (German: Rollkuchen) in 1968, in whose screenplay Lem himself also participated, so that this film became one of the few Lem adaptations with which the author subsequently expressed satisfaction.
In 1973, a Hungarian television series called Pirx kalandjai (directed by István Kazán and András Rajnai) came to a total of five episodes.
In 1978, the story The Trial provided the basis for the Polish-Soviet joint production Test pilota Pirxa (German Der Testflug des Piloten Pirx, also Testflug zum Saturn), directed by Marek Piestrak.
Lem's novel Solaris (1961) has been filmed three times to date: first in 1968 by Boris Nirenburg (Solaris (1968)), then in 1971 by Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris (1972)), and most recently in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh (Solaris (2002)). Lem himself thought nothing of the latter two films, and his opinion of Nirenburg's film adaptation is unknown.
In 1978/79, two different television plays were made almost simultaneously on both sides of the German-German border from one and the same original, one in 1978 for ZDF, the second the following year for GDR television: Die seltsamen Begegnungen des Prof. Tarantoga (director: Chuck Kerremans, with Richard Münch and Peter Striebeck, 100 minutes) was broadcast by ZDF in 1978, its GDR counterpart Professor Tarantoga und sein seltsamer Gast (director: Jens-Peter Proll, with Eberhard Esche and Volkmar Kleinert, 59 minutes) on GDR television in 1979.
In 1992, BR and SWF produced the literary film narrative The Invisible Friend (director: Ray Müller, with Josef Bierbichler, Andreas Giebel and Volkmar Kleinert, 77 minutes), based on Lem's story The Friend.
Based on Lem's collection of stories about the pilot Ijon Tichy, the episodes of the TV series Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot - Die Sterntagebücher (director: Dennis Jacobsen, Randa Chahoud, Oliver Jahn) were produced for ZDF in 2007 and 2011.
The Futurama episode Planet of the Robots resembles a story from the Star Diaries. Likewise, the musical instrument Holophonor described in Futurama corresponds to the instrument Genetophor depicted by Lem in his novel The Guest in Space (basically identical functionality, the only difference: in Lem it is a keyboard instrument and in Futurama a wind instrument).
In 2013, Ari Folman's film The Congress was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. The semi-animated action drama was inspired by Stanisław Lem's The Futurological Congress, though the plot differs greatly from the original. The film was praised by the Lem family and Polish Lem connoisseurs.

Selected characters from Lem's works

Ijon Tichy

One of the main characters in Lem's work is Ijon Tichy (derived from Cichy, Polish for: "The Silent One"). He is the main character in The Star Diaries and several other novels (The Futurological Congress, Local Appointment, and Peace on Earth or The Flop). He is a kind of space Münchhausen who has mad adventures on alien worlds. In connection with Tichy, his friend Professor Tarantoga also appears in some stories. Among other things, it is he who sends Tichy to the Futurological Congress.

Pirx

Pilot Pirx appears in a group of stories (including Test, The Hunt and Terminus, collected in Pilot Pirx) and in the novel Fiasco. He represents a rather serious character, but also has some amusing experiences for the reader. Pirx dies at the latest in Fiasco, one of Lem's last novels - though the reader does not learn for certain whether it is he who is revived or Parvis, another pilot who had also crashed in Birnham's forest on Titan.

Trurl and Klapauzius

In the Kyberiade - a collection of short stories - these two robotic beings appear as constructors. Lem deliberately builds up a humorous mood with fairy-tale undertones in order to be able to play out his thought experiments free of technical and physical restrictions. For example, Trurl and Klapauzius save the universe after nearly destroying it with one of their inventions. They end wars and create new worlds.

Mural in Krakow in memory of Lem.